The Birth of Jazz: Billie Holiday's Baltimore

Description

This evening of jazz history and the performing arts features a lecture by Robert O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston professor of English at Columbia University and author of an acclaimed biography of Billie Holiday. Following the lecture, view a showcase of archival images curated by Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of history and English at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, and co-curated by Raynetta Wiggins-Jackson, the Inheritance Baltimore and Billie Holiday Center Curatorial Fellow for Africana Collections.

The showcase reveals new information about Billie Holiday's girlhood in Baltimore, the early 20th century jazz scene in the city, and the ongoing connection between Holiday and the historic Black Arts District of Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, with maps, archival photographs, and recently acquired materials from the Sheridan Libraries—a sublime visual and intellectual experience of the earliest archives that reveal the foundation of Baltimore jazz.

The event includes a cabaret-style concert of Billie Holiday's songbook, performed by vocalist Candice Hoyes and Peabody Jazz Studies Chair Sean Jones.